The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen

British soldier drives
a bulldozer to push bodies into mass grave at Belsen

Mike Lewis, a Jewish soldier in the British
Army, filmed the bulldozers, driven by British soldiers, as they
shoved the emaciated bodies towards the mass graves. This documentary
film is still shown today at the Memorial Site. In the film,
Mike Lewis said that he took a turn driving the bulldozer himself,
while another soldier held the camera. The SS men and women were
forced, at gunpoint, to carry the bodies with their bare hands
to the mass graves.

One of the witnesses to the liberation
of Bergen-Belsen by British soldiers on April 15, 1945 was Iolo
Lewis, a 20-year-old soldier from Wales. He recalled that, as
he arrived at Belsen, Commandant Kramer and his assistant, Irma
Grese, were standing at the gates to greet them. Most of the
SS men, who were the guards in the camp, had escaped before the
British arrived. Commandant Josef Kramer and 80 of the SS men
and women had volunteered to remain in the camp to carry out
their duties. He said that he counted 13,000 unburied corpses
at the time of the liberation, and that the haunting memory never
left him, particularly the pearly colour of the piled-up bodies,
small, like the bodies of children.

Lewis said that his comrades pushed cigarettes
and sweets through the wire to the inmates who fell on them so
ferociously that some were left dead on the ground, torn to pieces
in the sordid scramble. The Hungarian Wehrmacht soldiers, who
had been assigned to guard the camp during the transition, shot
into the mob and killed numerous people. Lt. Lawrence Alsen,
a British soldiers who was at the camp on the day of the liberation,
told his son Niall after the war that "In some respects,
the Hungarians were worse than the Germans."

According to Eberhard Kolb, who wrote
a book about Bergen-Belsen, there were "ferocious scenes"
on the day of the liberation and the following night. Kolb wrote
that "A succession of detested Kapos were also lynched in
this period."

Some of the prisoners who had arrived
on the 8th of April 1945 had taken the opportunity to plunder
the kitchen and food stocks. The British reported later that
there was no food in the camp when they arrived.

On April 17, 1945, two days after the
first British soldiers arrived, British Medical units were at
the scene. The first thing they did was to set up a hospital
area in the barracks of the German Army training camp nearby.
Also on that date, the British arrested the entire personnel
of the SS Commandant's office, the 50 men and 30 women who had
voluntarily stayed behind to help the British manage the catastrophe.
A Jewish Camp Committee was organized by the survivors, under
the leadership of Josef Rosensaft.

On April 18, 1945, the burial of the
dead began. The staff members, who were now prisoners of the
British, were ordered to do the work of burying the bodies. The
British deliberately forced the SS staff to use only their bare
hands to handle the corpses of prisoners who had died of contagious
diseases. In the documentary film which was shown in the newsreels
in theaters around the world, a British officer said that the
Germans were being punished by not allowing them to use gloves
to handle the bodies. According to Eberhard Kolb, 20 out of the
80 guards, who were forced to handle diseased bodies without
wearing protective gear, died later and the majority of the deaths
were from typhus.

On April 21, 1945, the evacuation of
the camp began. The prisoners were first deloused and then moved
into the barracks of the German Army Training Center next to
the camp. Two days later, 6 detachments of the Red Cross arrived
to help. The epidemics had yet to be brought under control and
400 to 500 prisoners were still dying each day, but by April
28, the German guards had caught up with the burial of the bodies
and the mass graves were completed.

German civilians from the towns of Bergen
and Belsen were brought to the camp on April 25, 1945. Below
is an excerpt from the speech of the British officer to the elderly
Germans before taking them on a tour of the camp. (Quoted from
"The World Must Know" by Michael Berenbaum)

What you will see here is the final
and utter condemnation of the Nazi party. It justifies every
measure the United Nations will take to exterminate that party.
What you will see here is such a disgrace to the German people
that their names must be erased from the list of civilized nations
[...] It is your lot to begin the hard task of restoring the
name of the German people [...] But this cannot be done until
you have reared a new generation amongst whom it is impossible
to find people prepared to commit such crimes; until you have
reared a new generation possessing the instinctive good will
to prevent a repetition of such horrible cruelties. We will now
begin our tour.

Prisoners continued to die, in spite
of the medical treatment provided by the Red Cross and the British
Army. Nine thousand died in the first two weeks after the British
arrived, and another 4000 died in May. The bodies were thrown
into unmarked mass graves, even though the identities of these
prisoners were known. Today none of the mass graves at Bergen-Belsen
has a stone with the names of those who are buried there.

Prisoner who died after
liberation is added to mass grave, 1 May 1945

Bodies of prisoners
who died after the liberation

A British documentary film shows healthy
Jewish liberated prisoners lined up, screaming at the top of
their lungs at the SS men and women as they go about their macabre
task. On the day that the German civilians were brought to the
camp, the Jewish women in the camp screamed at them as the Germans
were forced to watch the loading of the corpses. Later the Bergen
residents were forced to evacuate their homes and former Jewish
prisoners moved in; the Germans were ordered to leave all their
silverware, china and linens for the use of the former prisoners.

British soldiers guard
SS men as they load bodies on trucks

On April 29, the day after the German
guards completed their gruesome task of 10 days of burying the
10,000 decomposed bodies with their bare hands, they were taken
to the prison in the city of Celle, which is 16 kilometers northwest
of the camp. Also on that day, April 29, 1945, American soldiers
entered the Dachau concentration camp and discovered bodies of
prisoners who had died of typhus. The next day, 97 medical students
arrived in Bergen-Belsen to help with the sick prisoners, and
on May 4th, more British medical units arrived. On that same
day, May 4, 1945, part of the German Army surrendered to the
British in the area near the camp.

By May 19, 1945, all the former prisoners
had been evacuated to the nearby Army barracks and on May 21,
1945, the last hut at the Bergen-Belsen camp was burned to the
ground. The horror that was Bergen-Belsen had been completely
wiped off the face of the earth. Today the former camp is a landscaped
park with heather, which blooms in August, covering the mass
graves. Most of the visitors to the Memorial Site are German
students who come on tour buses.

Bergen-Belsen barracks
were burned 21 May 1945

In July 1945, 6,000 survivors were taken
to Sweden to recover from their ordeal at Bergen-Belsen. Some
of them stayed there as long as three years to recover from typhus.

The former prisoners at Bergen-Belsen
who were willing to return to their home countries were released
from the camp and had to find their way home by themselves. Along
the way, they helped themselves to whatever they wanted, looting
and stealing.

Clara L. was a Hungarian Jew who was
sent on a transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, but was then
evacuated to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945 after the Nazis were
forced to abandon the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Soviet
Army. She told the following story to the editors of a book called
"Witness, Voices from the Holocaust":

You see, when Bergen-Belsen was liberated
these people were let loose. So we were wandering. We were wandering
from one place to another. And there were warehouses. We came
to a building, and we walked in, and I still see rows and rows
and shelves of handbags, ladies' handbags. As we were walking
over there to reach those shelves, I sort of stepped on something.
And I said to my friend, "Look! There's a body!" You
see, somebody, one of these inmates who wandered to these warehouses
and dropped dead from exhaustion or something. And she says,
"What do you want me to do about it?" I said, "Let's
carry it out." She said, "Are you crazy? You can't
carry that out." and she took a few packages of these linens
and dropped it on (the body). And then we went to the shelves,
and she wanted a handbag. And I wasn't in the mood anymore for
the handbag. She pulled out one handbag. It was an alligator
handbag. She says, "Take this one." I took it, and
she took another one, and we walked out. And I remember, as we
left the place, I just threw back the bag. I said, "I don't
want it." - and walked away. And this only came back. I
never thought about it.

The Zionists at Bergen-Belsen, who wanted
to go to Palestine, were housed at the Germany Army Training
Center to wait for permission from the British who were in control
of Palestine at that time. The DP camp at the Army Base was the
largest one in Europe. It remained open until 1950, after the
last Jews had emigrated to Palestine or some other country.